Podcast #20: Diversifying the Shelves (Part 2) with Author Sarah Ockler & Blogger Racquel of The Book Barbies
We're super-thrilled to publish the second half of our discussion with author Sarah Ockler and Racquel, blogger from The Book Barbies, about diversifying our bookshelves, how writers can work to authentically represent people of color in their fiction and recommendations for books and authors that do this successfully. You can find the first half over here.
In this half, we get down to the nitty-gritty and recommend some novels that really, in our eyes, get it right, and why. It's important to emphasize that this is most definitely not a comprehensive conversation--if anything, it's framing questions and talking about our personal experiences. We hope to continue to explore this topic in future episodes. If you'd like to be involved in a future podcast discussion on this subject, get in touch and let's talk.
We invited Sarah Ockler on because she wrote this great post on her blog on this very subject some time ago, and then walked the walk in her next book, The Book of Broken Hearts (2013, Simon Pulse), which we discussed extensively in one of the first podcast episodes of season one. Her next book, #scandal, is due out this summer and Laura and I have both already read and very much enjoyed it. Learn more about Sarah on her website and be sure to follow her on Twitter, too.
Racquel, along with her co-blogger Sharon, runs one of our favorite blogs, The Book Barbies. She's still an actual teen, and is in her first year in college. Racquel is originally from Saudi Arabia and still spends her summers back home, and brought a unique perspective to our conversation. You can find the season one episode about fictional families in which she and Sharon joined us here.
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Books & Links Mentioned
To view the mentions from the first half of this podcast, click here.
Books we wanted to talk about, but we ran out of time.
Race in YA Lit: Wake Up & Smell the Coffee-Colored Skin, White Authors! (Sarah Ockler)
Why Hasn’t the Number of Multicultural Books Increased In Eighteen Years? (Lee & Low)
The Ongoing Problem of Race in YA (The Atlantic)
Portraying Ethnic Characters with Dignity in Contemporary Romance (Vicki Essex)
12 Fundamentals Of Writing “The Other” (And The Self) (Buzzfeed)
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